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A recent conversation with a young entrepreneur—followed by a closer look at some recent data—got me thinking. When it comes to starting a new business, who has the greater advantage? The 25-year-old upstart or the seasoned 52-year-old entrepreneur?

Statistically, older entrepreneurs have the advantage. However there are unique advantages to starting a business at every age.

Forbes contributor Liz Kammel gives some interesting perspective in her recent article Start A Company When You're 25--Not When You're 52. Liz points out that the younger entrepreneur may have the greater advantage in many respects – 1) you’re already fairly poor, 2) energy and motivation will never be higher, and 3) you have no fear about challenging the “status quo.” All great points. However, Liz cautions that if a young founder’s company succeeds in qualifying for a large Series A or B round of funding, the VC will most likely replace the entrepreneur with a more seasoned executive.

Consider this finding as well – The Kauffman Ewing Institute posted recent data on how 5,000 start-ups launched in 2004 have fared over time. The report says "firms surviving through 2008 were much more likely than firms that exited over the period to have primary owners older than age 45."

Of the 5,000 start-ups in the study, 48 percent were started by founders who were 45 or older. However, a full 64 percent of the surviving companies were headed by entrepreneurs in the 45-and-up group. This is a fairly surprising result. Said the Kauffman report: “Previous industry experience and start-up experience had less impact on firm survival prospects than did owner age."

In a recent interview with US News, Dennis Ceru, an Adjunct professor at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass, also noted that older people not only have a great deal of business experience, they also tend to have more financial resources than younger entrepreneurs.

Ceru notes there are many tales of younger business successes in which entrepreneurs didn't have the experience to know where the barriers to success would be located, and overcame obstacles they didn't know existed when they began. In contrast, he notes that older entrepreneurs often have extensive business connections that help them anticipate and bypass such barriers rather than frontally assaulting them. The result in both cases is success, but the route to achieving it is quite different.

There is ample evidence that older entrepreneurs tend to be more successful. For example, Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University researcher worked with the Kauffman Foundation in 2009 to explore the anatomy of a successful startup founder. That survey of more than 500 startups in high-growth industries showed that the average founder of a successful company had launched his or her venture at the surprisingly high age of 40. The study also found that people over 55 are almost twice as likely to launch high-growth startups than those aged 20 to 34.

The term “high growth” is key. 2010's top two fastest-growing tech startups, according to Forbes, were First Solar, founded by a 68-year old, followed by Riverbed Technology, co-founded by entrepreneurs who were 51 and 33 at the time.

So the data seems to be showing that older entrepreneurs are starting a greater number of companies--and in particular, are starting a greater number of high growth companies—and their companies have a significantly higher statistical chance to survive.

However, we should also take a look at the kinds of companies young entrepreneurs tend to launch. A recent Fast Companyarticle by author Rob Salkowitz notes that "the kinds of businesses founded by young entrepreneurs make a much bigger impact when they succeed, and leave a much lighter mark when they fail."

Salkowitz appears to be referring to the two kinds of companies we equate most fully with younger entrepreneurs: 1) smaller firms launched with very little capital—statistically many of these fail, but when they do, they result in only a few lost jobs and little money is lost, or 2) the no-holds-barred kind of companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Twitter or Facebook. Each of these companies was founded by entrepreneurs younger than 35. Even with the stress of situations such as Facebook’s rocky IPO, there is no doubt these companies are succeeding and they are companies that are changing the world.